


A Mother Gives Life

by Crowoxy



Series: Platonic Paladins and Aliens [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Child Death, Depression, F/M, Galra Royal family, Gen, Honerva - Freeform, Not a healthy relationship, Postpartum Depression, is definitely not doing so well in this, not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-28 19:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12613960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowoxy/pseuds/Crowoxy
Summary: Honvera and Zarkon and the mystery revolving around Lotor's circumstantial birth. Or what started as good intentions ended up being so very different than what was planned.Part of the Platonic VLD Week: Day 4 - Horror





	A Mother Gives Life

**Author's Note:**

> Do keep in mind the tags on this guys, it's short but definitely might be triggering to some people. I think I actually stayed mostly on the prompt this time too.

They were supposed to be a happy family. It wasn’t something that Honerva had known she wanted, she had been too consumed by her work even after she married. But Zarkon had spoken to her about having a child, and Honerva found herself agreeing after some consideration because _she actually really wanted this_.

Honerva didn’t tell anyone when she noticed she was pregnant. In the quiet and solitude of her personal lab, Honerva conducted tests to see if the babe growing inside of her was healthy. Only then did she sneak into Zarkon’s room in the dead of the night to tell him the good news.

He had picked her up and spun her around in the privacy of their quarters, laughing in such complete glee that Honerva found herself joining him in his joyful silliness.

Life continued; Zarkon remained the steadfast ruler of Diabaazal and Honerva never stopped studying quintessence or the rift. Maybe she should have.

Honerva had known from the start that for all of the miracles quintessence presented, it was still a volatile magical substance that held more secrets than what she had already discovered. It wasn’t the first explosion her labs had contained within their walls; but before, she had been surrounded by other scientists of the same or nearly same caliber as Honerva herself. This time she was working late, alone in the labs except for the nearly developed symbiotic mass growing in her uterus. The explosion pushed Honerva harshly into the wall and it was only due to the magic she possessed that none of her equipment or any quintessence landed on her.

Her spine did hurt though. Much more than she expected it to. It was no matter. Honerva would just check herself out later, as she always did. She pushed herself off of the wall and winced as her back throbbed and her abdomen clenched uncomfortably.

“You’re fine.” She muttered to her protruding stomach and started to clean the lab. She had read somewhere that talking to your baby was healthy, so Honerva would whisper innate phrases and hope she was doing the right thing.  

Two quintants later, Honerva found herself in the middle of another explosion in her lab that ended up with purified quintessence all over the walls and her skin. It was when she was in the middle of the decontamination procedure when she realized the quintessence hadn’t harmed her; in fact she had never felt more _alive._ This needed to be studied much more thoroughly.

Several movements passed and Honerva found herself breaking Zarkon’s wrist while she struggled to muffle her cries and the medical specialists used their skills to try and coax the baby out of her.

“Something’s wrong,” one of the doctors said worriedly.

“What do you mean, something is wrong?” Zarkon shouted, barely wincing as his wife twisted his wrist nearly out of its socket.

“We’re looking at a stillborn,” the doctor ignored Zarkon. “Get it out of her now! Where is the surgeon?”

Zarkon tried to stand to demand answers but was pushed back into his chair by one of the doctors.

“Sire, you may be our king, but right now if you keep disturbing us, you will lose your wife!”

“And the baby?” Zarkon asked fearfully, glancing down at Honerva.

“Already lost, I’m sorry. Now please stop distracting us and let us do our jobs.”

There was supposed be crying during the birthing process; Honerva didn’t need articles or books to tell her that. The absence of a child’s cry cut worse than any of the scalpels that scraped against her insides and not even Zarkon’s gentle hugs could fill that hole.

The doctors told her there was nothing she could have done; the child had been dead inside of her for almost a phoeb. How could she not blame herself? Her son, her Lotor, had died and she hadn’t _even noticed_. It didn’t matter what platitudes the doctors told her, or how Zarkon put aside his duties as the King of Daibaazal to attend to her; if Honerva had just put aside her obsession with studying the rift, she knew without a doubt that their child would have lived.

It was all her fault. She needed to fix this.

 

* * *

 

Honerva stood in her lab once more, holding a bundle of cloth in her arms. Against the advice of everyone in the hospital, Honerva had kept the body of her stillborn son, keeping it wrapped up in a cyro-tube to preserve the body not let it fall into decay. At her feet, Kova purred, rubbing her fur along Honerva’s legs.

Kova was the inspiration for her latest thoughts and potential experimentations. Her cat had outlived her entire species normal lifespan by almost twice over now, and Honerva knew it had to do with the quintessence Kova was exposed to.

“I will not fail, Lotor,” Honerva pulled back the sheet covering the corpse’s head and smiled at the tuft of light black hair that crowned the face. “Soon, you will be able join your father and I and we can be the perfect family.”

Honerva placed the body in a vat of the quintessence that she had prepared, waiting for the body to miraculously start moving and crying, breathing in its first lungfuls of air.

Nothing happened.

Honerva waited vargas upon vargas, pacing about the lab, and scrubbing every surface she could see just to wait some more. Zarkon found her just after dawn, sobbing in the corner of the lab at her failure.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Honerva,” Zarkon whispered into her gray hair that was starting to grow streaks of white. “You’re only hurting yourself more with these projects.”

“No! I have to complete them!” She buried her head into his shoulder, “I have to get Lotor back with us!”

“He’s gone,” Zarkon said gently, picking Honerva out to carry back to their bedroom. “He’s gone and we both miss him, but we have to keep moving forward.”

Honerva was back in the lab the next quintant, and the quintant after that.

She started trying to clone Lotor, using samples from the body and infusing it with quintessence to bring the cells to life and have them grow in a tube. Honerva didn’t know how long it had taken her to perfect the technique, only that she had too many failures before the successes kicked in.

She never let Zarkon catch her in the lab again; slipping out of their quarters in the middle of the night and sneaking back in right before the sun rose. She couldn’t sleep much these days anyways. And a little quintessence right before she started her work was more than enough to wake her up to focus.

A little quintessence turned into a cupful of quintessence each night, and then even more for it to work for her. Honerva was desperate; she wouldn’t be able to complete her experiments with the cloning - which was coming along splendidly - without the quintessence, and she needed more to drink for her own personal use. She needed to find a way to get more.

So she convinced Zarkon to open the rift that had practically consumed Diabaazal at this point with the help of the Paladins and jumped in without a suit. She didn’t even have time to scream as the pure quintessence burned her alive.

 

* * *

 

When Haggar found the personal labs in a far off corner of the ship, she spent time going through all of the experiments that were catalogued and started them up again if they piqued her interest. One such experiment was the cloning and merging of cells for a project labeled Lotor. Most of the body parts were already well underway for growth, so Haggar simply added more, documenting what cells she had scraped off from the original mass and combined them with quintessence as the papers specified.

Decaphoebs later, one of the cyro-pods held a perfectly proportioned half-Galra child, with smooth purple skin and white hair. Haggar felt a strange wave of disappointment that this child… Lotor… had white hair instead of a light black. She had a feeling it would suit him much better than the white.  

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have a theory about Lotor's birth which is basically: Everyone with white hair has been exposed to quintessence, some better than others. Also clones, because Haggar clearly has an apparent cloning problem.


End file.
